As many already said yesterday, the Kubuntu.de story seems to be a classic example of a storm in a teacup. "Their article makes everything sound much worse than it is. The problem was that when kubuntu.org moved to a new host the sysadmin request to recreate Amu's account never got answered. Amu makes the cool Live CDs that get published along with KDE releases so it's obviously very useful for him to have an account. I should have poked Canonical's sysadmin to remind him but the account has now been added so problem solved. This doesn't mean, as some people seem to have suggested, that Canonical is in any way dropping support for Kubuntu, they continue to be wonderfully supportive, both to the community of developers and commercially if you want to buy a support contract off them."

Doesn't everyone just love how a simple headline can create such heated arguments? The QT vs. GTK or KDE vs. Gnome war will continue on and on much like any other religious wars.

My thoughts on the differences between QT and GTK are pretty simple. Commercial entities generally chose GTK over QT for the fact that it's free. Yes, the QT license isn't too expensive, but think about it this way. Let's say you have 20 programmers working on an application. This application when done will cost $99. Now, do you go with QT, which is $2000 per developer (at least someone else stated as such, I don't know for sure) which would be $40,000. Now that alone means that you'd have to sell 400 copies of that software to be able to make up JUST THE LICENSING COSTS. That's not counting developer costs, hardware costs, etc.

Granted, 400 copies is not that much, if it's a popular program like Office. That's still 40,000 that would not go into that companies revenue, that otherwise could have if they used GTK. Some companies (Adobe for example) could easily afford that much, especially since they charge 400-600 for photoshop. But think of it this way, if a company isn't paying for a toolkit, then quite possibly (depending on how honest or nice that compay is) pass the savings of theirs down onto the end users.